Moral Holiday Shopping Is Harder Than You Think

Do any of us really control our purchasing choices and their implications these days?

November 23, 2018

Back in 2012, Julie Keith was pulling out decorations for a Halloween-themed
birthday party in Damascus, Oregon, when a handwritten letter dropped out of
the box containing a fake tomb stone kit. It read: “Sir, If you occasionally
buy this product, please kindly send this letter to the World Human Right
Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the
Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”
The letter contained details of how inmates were treated at the Masanjia labour
camp in Shenyang, China, where the Halloween decorations were made. Inmates had
to work for 15 hours a day, seven days a week for less than $2.00 a month.
Refusal to comply would result in torture and beatings.

The story captured the
imagination of Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee, who managed to track down the
author of the letter, Sun Yi, leading to a much-discussed film this fall telling
the story of the treatment of the inmates of the Masanjia labour camp, many of
them unjustly imprisoned for their participation in the outlawed religious
group Falung
Gong. This doesn’t seem to be an anomaly: There are also reports of more
such letters finding their way into consumer goods sold in the US
and the UK. Technically, exporting goods produced by prison labour is illegal. Yet
complicated supply chains make it difficult to ensure that the law is followed.

Both liberals
and conservatives
champion the idea of free markets, not just for efficiency, but as a matter of
morality, of ideology. A free market is portrayed as the mark of an open and
fair society. What supposedly makes a free market free is not just the absence
of central government planning, but also the freedom of the agents who operate
within them. Within a free market, the
story goes, individuals act in their own self-interest, driven by
their needs and desires, purchasing the best available goods at the best
available prices. What happens, though, when someone discovers that acting on
the simple desire to put up holiday decorations renders them complicit in
forced labour in a far-away country?

The question of ethical consumption
frequently pops up in public discourse as purchasing ramps up from Black Friday
through the winter holidays. Some argue for more ethically
conscious purchases from brands that claim not to use morally
objectionable supply chains, whereas
others simply want to ban Black Friday altogether,
as a way of preventing the excessive consumerist behavior it brings out. But all
of these proposals are attempts to sidestep a problem that, as the Halloween
decoration incident showed, is increasingly inescapable in the global market.

German critical theorist Theodor
Adorno argued in the early twentieth century that true freedom in an unjust
world is an impossibility. At the time, the global economy he and his
contemporaries were critiquing was less developed than it would become. Today,
the complex, globally interconnected nature of modern capitalist markets means
that even mundane, everyday purchases can make us involuntary participants in
the oppression of others.

Theodor Adorno would not have seen
the letter from Masanjia, implicating a mother putting up decorations in slave
labor, as an anomaly.

Theodor Adorno would not have seen
the letter from Masanjia, implicating a mother putting up decorations in slave
labor, as an anomaly. He and his contemporaries in the so-called Frankfurt
School of interdisciplinary intellectuals in the 1930s saw such phenomena as
fundamental to the very character of a modern, capitalist market. As
individuals puzzled by the absence of a revolution within capitalist societies
that Marx had predicted, and, later, by the establishment of death camps in a
supposedly “enlightened” society, one of their fundamental interests was human
agency and responsibility. Struggling to explain both phenomena, they started to
focus not on individuals as the locus of responsibility for such events (or
their absence), but on the ways in which institutional and societal structures
condition and curtail human agency.

Those raised long after Auschwitz
might, at first glance, struggle to share the excessive pessimism about the
limits of human agency of a critic personally targeted by the German police and
forced to flee his homeland. Surely today, we might think, in Western liberal democracies,
people do have genuine agency. But for Adorno, the kind of freedom we enjoy
today is merely of a formal kind, one that leaves us feeling powerless. Free-market
ideology, for instance, suggests we can act on our own self-interests and buy
what we want (as long as we can afford it) without anyone getting in our way. And
yet advertising and innovation play a huge role in determining what our desires
and needs are in the first place. I never wanted to own a smart phone before
they were invented, but now owning one seems almost a necessity for functioning
in contemporary urban life. If you have little control over what your desires
and needs are, can you really be said to be free?

There is also a second way in which
Adorno thought that having formal freedom does not amount to being truly free. Being
free implies having moral responsibility, Adorno mused. But if you can’t be
reasonably held morally responsible for your actions, he argued, then you weren’t
really free in the first place. And according to Adorno “[w]e can only think of
ourselves as responsible in so far as we are able to influence matters in the
areas where we have responsibility.”

Thinking back to the letter from
Masanjia case, it seems clear that one could not reasonably be held responsible
for purchasing goods that were the product of forced labor, because there is
no way in which, under ordinary circumstances, a consumer could have known the
precise conditions under which the goods were produced. Worse, perhaps, even
when we do know that the products we
buy might be the result of morally objectionable practices, it seems there is
little we can do about it. It’s certainly unclear whether we can really have any
influence over the unjust incarceration of a religious minority in a far-away
country, or the practice of enforced labor in Chinese prisons. And as Adorno
recognized, according to the logic of a capitalist free market, it is in our
interest to buy the best goods at the cheapest prices, which often means at the
expense of those who produced the goods. If we are part of a market system that
incentivizes us to purchase goods whose origins we can’t be sure of, that might
be morally dubious, and over which we have no real influence, then, according
to Adorno, we are not truly free. In an unjust world, it is not always possible
to do the right thing.

Adorno’s analysis can often come
across as excessively defeatist. It’s true that as individuals we have very
little power over changing unjust structures that we involuntarily, or even without
our knowledge, participate in every day. But it is also true that sometimes, people
can mobilize and help change unjust practices.

Either way, however, Adorno’s critique
exposes the shallowness of the concept of freedom given to us by the free
market. The freedom to choose what to consume conceals the fact that our agency
and autonomy are compromised by innovation and marketing, and by objectionable
production practices that are beyond our control. The idea of humans as isolated
individuals, each pursuing their own interests, is a myth. We are far more
socially interconnected to one another than this picture suggests, and our
actions can have far-reaching consequences.

The usual solution offered to the moral
problems created by our participation in the global free market is to pursue a more
ethically informed consumerism. But this solution suffers from the same false presuppositions
that the idea of a free market does. It suggests that it is up to the
individual to solve this problem, and that it’s simply our free choice to
refuse to participate in production lines that rely on exploitation. What
Adorno shows is that the structure of the capitalist market place we live in
makes this nearly impossible. Instead of moralizing and shifting the blame onto
the consumer, Adorno’s critique recognizes that the incredible moral burden we
might feel in the face of stories like the letter from Masanjia is hugely disproportional
both to our level of responsibility in all this, and to our power to make a
difference as individuals. Instead of merely buying Fair Trade Certified goods,
to truly change the system we’d have to discard the false promise of freedom and
unrealistic individualism that the free market promotes, and work towards
developing a future morally engaged market and economic ideology that
recognizes our interdependence in a globalized economy. Only then, perhaps, will
being a consumer not amount to the morally fraught affair that it is
today.

Alexis Papazoglou writes on philosophy, current affairs, and politics. He previously taught philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Royal Holloway, University of London.